Tell a pork or ham story, win a gift card

I’ve got a pair of HoneyBaked Ham Co. gift cards to give away. Let’s hear your best story about or ode to ham or other pork products. The maximum word count is 100, and because I was rightly criticized for not enforcing the limit for a past giveaway, it’s an absolute rule this time; even 101 words is too many. One entry person person. Submit as a comment on this post. Ruth Fantasia and I will be doing the judging. You’ll obviously need to use a valid e-mail address (not for publication) when submitting the entry, so I can get in touch with you if you win. Deadline is noon Monday (11/23). Times Union and HoneyBaked Ham employees may not enter.

The best story gets a $50 gift card; the runner-up, $25. FYI, a 4-pound quarter-ham from HoneyBaked Ham’s Wolf Road store is $33.95.

31 Responses

No one, neither human nor feline, gets pig products in our house without first doing “The Bacon Dance.” The cat invented it one morning in a desperate attempt to get her fair share of bacon. One must stand on their hind legs, reach alternating arms or front paws skyward and dance a little side-to-side jig. The dance was soon expanded to apply to all pork and ham products, but it will always be known as “The Bacon Dance.”

There was this Rabbi in a small town, and he was really curious about why so many people ate pork. He wanted to try some, but there was nowhere in town he could go and not be seen.

One weekend, he made an excuse and traveled to a distant town, went into a restaurant and ordered the first pork item on the menu. While he’s waiting for his order of pork, the president of his congregation walks in. He sees the Rabbi and asks if he could join him for dinner, and the Rabbi has no choice but to agree.

Some time later, the waiter returns with the Rabbi’s meal. He takes the cover off the large platter, and there is a whole roast pig, with an apple in its mouth.

The congregation president is more than a little shocked.

“What a fancy place!” exclaims the Rabbi quickly. “Just look at how they serve the apple I ordered.”

My funny ham story, is when I told my mom I’d be bringing a friend home with me to dinner who didn’t eat red meat (she was a vegetarian) so my mom fixed ham. She was surprised by my objections because she said–ham wasn’t red meat!!

I met up with one of my oldest friends while in NY visiting family and I, knowing that his father’s company bought every employee a ham from Oscar’s as a Christmas gift, asked what he planned to do for Christmas dinner this year now that Oscar’s was closed,. He hadn’t heard about the fire and was visibly upset by the news. I witnessed a 6’4”, 320 lbs. adult man, with tears in his eyes, call his father from a bar on a Saturday night in September to ask what they were going to do for Christmas dinner this year.

I have fond memories of my Mom’s pork roast, studded with garlic, smelling heavenly, coming out out of the oven on Sunday afternoon. While it was resting and Mom was making gravy, my siblings and I would pull of pieces of crispy fat from the top of the roast. There was nothing better and now that pork is bred so lean, those days are over. Sigh….

I’m Jewish and I love ham; no one else in my family will touch it. Please please please chose me. I can’t really justify buying a ham. This would be perfect for Hannukah! I’ll make brisket for the rest of my crew.

My family is from PA and Lancaster. So scrapple, Tasty Cakes and cinnamon buns, etc. were always a stapple. My father turned us on to scrapple when we were very young, and we all loved it. We would bring a cooler home filled with scrapple and Tasty Cakes. Friends would ask what scrapple was, and we didn’t know being so young, but when we were suppose to be out of ear shot, an adult asked my Dad what scrapple was, and all he could say was “it’s everything but the oinker” ~ still laugh to this day. My husband won’t eat it and calls it “crapple”, but we don’t care, still love the stuff!

My wife and I went to our son Seamus’ 3rd grade open house years ago. On the children’s desk was journal with entries made for each child about school, play, home, etc. One of the questions posed to the children was, If you could have three things in the world what would they be. His #3 wish was a race car. His #2 wish was a laser rocket. And, his #1 wish was a lifetime supply of ham. Who’d a thought that pork would beat out a race car and a laser rocket. We still laugh about that to this day. Seamus is now 16 and ham is still his favorite meal. I’d even go as far as to say he loves it more than his Xbox.

My friends were having a house warming party. I was charged with roasting a suckling pig, they with ordering said pig. I expected a 20-25 pounder and had constructed an outdoor cooking rig accordingly, what the farmer delivered was a 60 pound animal. The farmer swore this is what was ordered. Not wanting to disappoint, I had to summarily dismember pig in order for it to fit on my roaster. Many friends lost their appetites watching me do this.

I purchased a half, pre-cooked honey ham along with a small turkey for Thanksgiving a few years back. Not wanting to serve cold ham, I removed the plastic wrapper and placed it in my roasting pan with a couple inches of water to heat it thru. When we were ready for dinner, I asked my husband if he would slice the ham. Almost immediately he yells, “Oh, My God, You baked it with the plastic still on it!”. To which I replied, “Oh, I thought that was skin”. Needless to say, we only had turkey that year.

Several years ago my mother was sick in the hospital and I went to visit with her. I brought a ham sandwich, my favorite, to eat. While she slept I decided to watch a movie and eventually decided to eat – it took me several minutes before I realized that as I was watching the adorable pig in “Babe,” I was eating said ham sandwich. I looked at the pig I was rooting for on screen, looked down at my sandwich, felt horribly guilty for a moment and finally thought “screw it. I love ham” and ate the whole thing.

My cousin grew up in the 4H program in a rural area. I grew up locally and couldn’t even tell you where to join 4H. One year, my cousin bought a pig that he named “Bacon”. Cute, adorable, etc. – I loved to play with it. He raised it as a 4H project until Thanksgiving time when it was served as our dinner. I couldn’t eat a pig I knew personally. Every year since, my family will not pass me the ham (seriously, they skip me on the table) and they tell me that I may has passed this one on the street and had a chance encounter and I’d eat an acquaintance. Ha ha (sarcasm). It stopped being funny 10 years ago. If I bring it, I’ll show them by having my own to not pass! Please pick me so I can eat ham this year.

My friend Scott, who was from the Western NY area used to go to HoneyBaked ham every year and bring his contribution to the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts. It was Scott, his mother and his grandmother; they were a small but close family. Every year I remember the week leading up to the holiday breaks; him bumming rides to Wolf Road, just to get his ham. Somehow every year he managed to get one; and his family was always delighted. Scott is alone now, but the love with which he procured the ham will always stay with me.

As was custom in my youth,after spending Thanksgiving with family, my friends and I would gather and do some partying. At the end of the night, I end up at 2 friends house. We send one of the friends into his familys home to bring out some 4a.m. munchies. He appears some time later out the 3rd floor window swinging a half eaten ham out the window by the bone!

He said goodnight and tossed the ham toward us…
It never hit the ground!
There were no leftovers.

When our middle son was younger he refused to eat meat other than bacon. Of course, we broadened his repertoire by introducing new foods as “bacon turkey,” “bacon chicken,” and “bacon beef.” Bacon remans his favorite food group.

When I was growing up, we’d go to a local farm to pick out a few piglets. A few months later, someone would come pick them up and shortly thereafter we’d have all sorts of pork products. This went on for a few years. After we stopped raising pigs, I stopped eating pork and red meat.
Whenever I go to my parent’s for ham dinner, they make me a chicken.

When I was a kid, my parents invited my Dad’s brother who had just gotten out of the Navy to Easter dinner. He was a bachelor no cooking skills.

My mom cooked a ham with all the fixings. She even put pineapple rings and candied cherries on the ham for a perfect Norman Rockwell touch. Uncle Bill ate multiple servings of everything, cleaning his plate so that *nothing* was left.

He complimented Mom with “It was all great, but I really enjoyed those black crunchy things in the ham the best.”

Oh Kerosena, I am so adopting your Bacon Dance (of joy). Consequently, when I get food-happy, I start wiggling and twisting my body, not unlike an uncoordinated high school boy trying to impress his prom date.

I am not a ham eater and here’s why: At an Easter dinner when I was about seven my mom served a canned ham (I had no idea there was any other kind until I was an adult). My older sister convinced me that I need to use a LOT of salt on the ham. So, I liberally salted my slice of ham and then cried through the rest of dinner because it was inedible! If I win the honeybaked ham I promise not to salt it!

One night my mom decided to cook pork tenderloin. I hate overcooked pork and instructed her to cook it to 130 degrees. She accomplished this task by leaving an instant read thermometer in the pork. Upon checking the pork a while later she noticed the white plastic thermometer had melted all over the pork. We did not eat pork that night. Please pick me so I can teach her how to cook it.

We never kept kosher, but growing up there was a limited subset of pork products in our home. Once as a teenager I was visiting a friend’s house and in his refrigerator was a bone-in spiral-sliced Honeybaked ham. I had never encountered anything like it before. What a site to behold. What a miracle of technology. And what an amazing taste of thick meaty, salty slices, edged with crunchy sweet glaze. My fingers were glistening with pork fat and sticky with sugar, as we devoured the ham standing in front of the refrigerator, with the door open.

My entry was the previous post. But I did want to mention one other thing. And just for the sake of this exercise, I did it in 100 words (or at least so says MS Word).

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Honeybaked hams are not supposed to be heated. Never. Never ever. They are to be brought slowly to room temperature. If you heat a Honeybaked ham, it sweats all of the salty goodness out of the meat, and you are left with an inferior product. The good folks at Honeybaked give those instructions clearly with every ham. But I cannot tell you how many Honeybaked hams I have seen ruined over the years, as I sat helplessly watching my hosts put the joint in the oven. After all, I am their guest. And fussy or not, I still have manners.

Ham means family, ’cause you can’t eat one on your own, and it means holidays because it’s perfect to gather around. In leftovers the variations are endless, be they breakfast, lunch or dunch. I am now hungry for pig so I know what I’ll have to go munch.